LONDON—Actor Daniel Radcliffe will spend the better part of this year in his native London, but ask him when he'll return to New York, and his blue eyes grow wistful.

"I do have a real love of New York now, because I've done two shows in New York and because New York is such a theater-based place," he said, referring to his turns on Broadway in "Equus" and "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

Sitting at a café in Fulham, the London neighborhood where he grew up, the 23-year-old actor said he has very different experiences in the two cities. "I almost never get called 'Harry Potter' in New York, whereas over here, it is a lot more," he said. "That's something you get very used to, very quickly, but it's also nice to be somewhere where people know you've done other stuff."

In his coming film, "Kill Your Darlings," Mr. Radcliffe embodies one of the most quintessential New Yorkers of all time: Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. He plays Ginsberg at an early period in the poet's life, when he moves away from his New Jersey home to attend Columbia University. There, he meets Lucien Carr (played by Dane DeHaan), who introduces him to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and together, their dreams of creating a "New Vision" of literature form the nascent beginnings of the Beat Generation.

Mr. Radcliffe recently filmed "Horns," based on Joe Hill's dark fantasy novel, and a romantic comedy, "The F-Word." But "Kill Your Darlings"—in which Mr. Radcliffe's Ginsberg discovers drugs, his feelings for Mr. Carr and the kind of poetry he really wants to write—may prove to be the biggest game changer in the actor's career. The film is scheduled to be released in the fall—when Mr. Radcliffe is likely to pass through New York again.

"It was liberating," Mr. Radcliffe said. "I think that film, in combination with the year I had just had with 'How to Succeed,' really freed something up in me and I just started thinking: 'Don't be inhibited, and just go for it and see what happens.'"

Mr. Radcliffe, who keeps a home in the West Village, is now in London preparing to play the lead role in a new West End production of Martin McDonagh's "The Cripple of Inishmaan." The Wall Street Journal recently met Mr. Radcliffe there.

In playing Allen Ginsberg, you've taken on one of the most iconic and quintessential New Yorkers. As someone who grew up in London, what did you do to learn and become him?

The most immediate resource for me was his diaries, because they give an amazing insight into the kind of boy he was, which was somebody who had a great deal of faith in himself, somebody who was unique and individual and was in some way going to distinguish himself from his peers. That comes through so quickly. He's very resolute that it's going to be something artistic. He writes about composing a concerto when he was 14 and things like that. The diaries give a very clear and really helpful picture of him as being somebody who was fairly pretentious and incredibly smart and very, very ambitious. The other thing that does come through particularly in the later diaries, he's incredibly compassionate as well. But at that young age, in the years before the film starts as it were, 13 to 17, he's quite wrought a lot of the time with emotion, and it was all very pent-up and he was desperate to get out of the shadow of his parents and stop living under that.

Did you research Allen's life only until the period captured in the film, and not after?

We'd been specifically asked not to by the director. John [Krokidas] just said: "Focus on the time—everything before that you can find out about their lives, and up to the point when we show them." Learning anything beyond that could have been counterproductive. When I was first cast, some other people would ask me questions like, "Are you going to grow a beard?" And I think other people had questions about the voice as well. The voice I'm doing in the film is the voice of somebody who hasn't yet smoked hundreds of thousands of cigarettes and done loads of drugs and had a lot of late nights and drunk tons of alcohol, which is obviously what he went on to do. I'm playing him on the cusp of all that self-discovery. That's what the film's about—it's about really showing where he was coming from and just leaving the audience with a hint of the person that he was going to become.

Like Harry Potter, the character of Ginsberg comes with the weight of expectation from the outside world. Were you nervous about disappointing his fans?

I was nervous about not doing a good job, and therefore had I not done a good job, then it would have been a disappointment to not just the fans of Allen but to myself and the film. I think the point of the film was that we didn't want to be reverent of the Beats. So in that sense, I don't think we could afford to be worried about upsetting people because we're telling a very distinct story and it's coming from a director who has a very distinct vision for the film. But I think what we did and what we set out to do and what we thought would please fans of the Beats most, by doing this, is by capturing their irreverence at that age. How it was about departing from the establishment. We thought if we made the film in that spirit while obviously trying to be faithful to the characters, that would be the most accurate depiction of the Beats. When I chose the part, it wasn't a situation of going, "Oh my god, I'll get to play Allen Ginsberg." My reaction was: "Oh my god, I'll have a chance to play this part in this film." It was a reaction to the part and the way it was written. In a way, you just have to think of it as being a part like any other that you happen to have a huge amount of background research material already done for you on.

What differences do you see when you do theater on Broadway versus the West End?

New York is a more theater-centric town than London. London is pretty theater-centric but New York is—the way I can most easily illustrate that is how long have the Tonys been televised for? And the Olivier Awards for the first time last year. There are people in New York who go and see 40 shows a year, and I don't know people in the industry, frankly, who see that many shows a year. The slightly embarrassing thing about New York is the entrance round, where when you walk on stage people clap. It doesn't happen here. And the other thing: Standing ovations in New York, you'd have to suck to not get one, but I also think it comes out of a generosity. I think when New Yorkers pay as much as they have to, to go and see a Broadway show, they're like, "I'm going to go, I'm going to be entertained, and I'm going to have a great time." And that's a fantastic attitude to bring into the theater with you. I'm still very protective and sort of patriotic, having spent a lot of time in New York, I personally think we still have the upper hand on straight plays. Musicals, New York is the spiritual home of the musical and no one's ever going to take that away from New York. There's just a slickness to American musicals that I find amazing.

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